Thoughts about software and technology

Jamu Kakar's blog

My friend and colleague at Fluidinfo,
Manuel Cerón, gave me this script that
he wrote to remove merged branches from local and remote Git
repositories. Removing branches after merging is one of those fairly
painless housekeeping tasks that doesn't create a great deal of
friction, which makes it easy ...

It's been a long while since I posted and a lot has happened! A litte
more than a year ago I left Canonical and
joined Fluidinfo. Fluidinfo is a shared
openly-writable metadata storage platform, often referred to as a
social network for data. There's a lot to say ...

Earlier this year I was working with Canonical's design team. We were
putting our heads together to develop a fantastic cloud user
experience in Landscape. I created a concept map to help clarify the
various artefacts involved in the
EC2 API.
It's not entirely complete, but it does ...

Some time ago during a sprint, I noticed that
Free Ekanayaka, one of my
Landscape teammates, had excellent pyflakes/flymake integration that
dramatically improved the experience of editing Python files in emacs.
When I asked him about it he kindly offered ...

A number of folks at Canonical have been
writing about what we do and how our work contributes to the goal of
getting free software into the mainstream. Canonical and
Ubuntu have brought free software to the
general public in a way that hasn't been done before, in a ...

Yesterday I released version 0.17 of
Storm. This release fixes a
checkpointing bug that could cause coherency issues in certain
situations involving triggers. It introduces a handful of new
features and optimizations including the ability to get a
Select
expression from a
ResultSet,
which is useful when building a ...

I've been using the EC2 API quite a lot lately, while working on the
Landscape project. The
API documentation
is excellent, but I want to know how it behaves when things go wrong.
What kind of failure is produced when I forget to pass a parameter?
What happens when ...

I've been meaning to write about
Commandant for ages. I started it
last year because I wanted to write command driven applications with a
user experience just like Bazaar.
There are several things that I like about Bazaar's user interface:

People ask me questions about Storm
several times a week, and I'm happy to help where I can, but it would
be better if the information our users need was easier to find. Our
documentation story is weak and, as a result, Storm is harder to
discover than it ...